One of my ideas when the club started was that we have an event where the club can have setups of playable games for anyone interested at the university to play, similar to how other universities that have gaming programs require theirs students to show their projects. I also thought it could be similar to the Computer Science senior design project fairs I have seen in past semesters here on campus.
We are hosting our first ever Student Showcase Wed Apr 26 6-8pm, showing off different game projects students have worked on this past year! pic.twitter.com/nSECMgW73K
— WVU Game Developers (@wvugdc) April 24, 2017
Our club is really lucky to meet in the Reed College of Media Innovation Center. It has a lot going for it, being in one of the newest buildings on campus, it is located right next to the Evansdale PRT station and it has some great tech. They have screens in about every room there that can be connected to wirelessly with their software on anyone’s laptop or via HDMI connection. On top of that, they have four media carts with both of those connection options, which finally made this showcase idea a viable and doable event for us. So we were able to set up five live games through connected laptops that each game’s developers brought to run their game on. They all used the HDMI since we wanted the input to not have any delays that the wireless would sometimes get.
@wvugdc @gordongee WVU Game Developers Club providing excitement to our next generation of developers. pic.twitter.com/WqAwa26X0c
— Kevin Tephabock (@KevinTephabock) April 26, 2017
The actual event was two hours and split in half, with the first hour being club reflections, individual game presentations from club members that wanted to talk about their games to everyone in attendance, and club awards. In the second hour, we had the stations set up where attendees could play the individual games that we had setup.
We gave club influencer awards to several WVU staff members that helped our club in the past year with our various events including the Global Game Jam and Unity Workshops. Overall, everyone in attendance enjoyed themselves and everyone that wasn’t part of the club I think enjoyed talking to the individual teams about their games, in addition to playing them.
We filmed most of the event and I will be linking to that YouTube playlist once it is made below.